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Clark, Scale, From Cohen, Ed. Telemorphosis (2012)
Clark, Scale, From Cohen, Ed. Telemorphosis (2012)
Scale
Derangements of Scale
Timothy Clark
Derangements of Scale
One symptom of a now widespread crisis of scale is a derangement of lin-
guistic and intellectual proportion in the way people often talk about the
environment, a breakdown of “decorum” in the strict sense. Thus a sen-
Scale 151
tence about the possible collapse of civilization can end, no less solemn-
ly, with the injunction never to fill the kettle more than necessary when
making tea. A poster in many workplaces depicts the whole earth as giant
thermostat dial, with the absurd but intelligible caption “You control cli-
mate change.” A motorist buying a slightly less destructive make of car is
now “saving the planet.”
These deranged jumps in scale and fantasies of agency may recall rhet-
oric associated with the atomic bomb in the 1950s and after. Maurice
Blanchot argued then that talk of humanity having power over the whole
earth, or being able to “destroy itself,” was deeply misleading. “Human-
ity” is not some grand mega-subject or unitary agent in the sense this
trope implies. In practice such destruction would certainly not be some
sort of consciously performed act of self-harm, “humanity destroying it-
self.” It would be as arbitrary as was “the turtle that fell from the sky” and
crushed the head of Aeschylus (Blanchot 106).
The almost nonsensical rhetoric of environmental slogans makes
Blanchot’s point even more forcefully. Received concepts of agency, ra-
tionality and responsibility are being strained or even begin to fall apart
in a bewildering generalizing of the political that can make even filling a
kettle as public an act as voting. The very notion of a “carbon footprint”
alters the distinctions of public and private built into the foundations of
the modern liberal state. Normally, demands in a political context to face
the future take the form of some rousing call to regained authenticity,
whether personal, cultural or national, and they reinforce given norms of
morality or responsibility, with an enhanced sense of determination and
purpose. With climate change this is not the case. Here a barely calcu-
lable nonhuman agency brings about a general but unfocused sense of
delegitimation and uncertainty, a confusion of previously clear arenas of
action or concepts of equity; boundaries between the scientific and the
political become newly uncertain, the distinction between the state and
civil society less clear, and once normal procedures and modes of under-
standing begin to resemble dubious modes of political, ethical and intel-
lectual containment. Even a great deal of environmental criticism, mod-
eling itself on kinds of progressive oppositional politics and trying (like
Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology”) to explain environmental degrada-
tion by reference solely to human-to-human hierarchies and oppressions
152 Timothy Clark
can look like an evasion of the need to accord to the nonhuman a discon-
certing agency of its own.
The environmental crisis also questions given boundaries between in-
tellectual disciplines. The daily news confirms repeatedly the impossibil-
ity of reducing many environmental issues to any one coherent problem,
dysfunction, or injustice. Overpopulation and atmospheric pollution,
for instance, form social, moral, political, medical, technical, ethical and
“animal rights” issues, all at once. If that tired term “the environment” has
often seemed too vague—for it means, ultimately, “everything”—yet the
difficulty of conceptualizing a politics of climate change may be precisely
that of having to think “everything at once”. The overall force is of an im-
plosion of scales, implicating seemingly trivial or small actions with enor-
mous stakes while intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation fold
in upon each other. The inundation of received intellectual boundaries
and the horror of many probable future scenarios has the deranging ef-
fect, for instance, of making deeply unsure which of the following two
statements is finally the more responsible—(1) “climate change is now
acknowledged as a legitimate and serious concern and the government
will continue to support measures to improve the fuel efficiency of mo-
tor vehicles” or (2) “the only defensible relationship to have with a car is
with a well aimed brick”?1
rhetoric of liberalism that still pervades a large body of given cultural and
literary criticism. An ethic attending such work would also breach cur-
rent notions of decorum, redrawing the seeming boundaries of privacy
whereby, say, a critic’s professed views on history, religion, colonialism
or ethics are all seen to belong in the realm of “public” controversy, semi-
nars, papers and conferences while the resources sequestered to that per-
son’s sole use remain a supposedly “private” matter, with a high salary and
its attendant life-style still regarded, if at all, as a matter of prestige.
The narrator’s aged mother, “poor and greedy,” (74) relies on the sup-
port of both her sons to maintain her independent lifestyle amid signs
of failing health. The narrator’s son demands money to enable him to
emigrate and a divorced wife has to be paid alimony. Struggling with his
resentment as he writes all the cheques, the narrator reaches a turning
point with two dreams, one of them being about how his father used to
carry him on his shoulder when he was a child, and he would feel safe,
stretch out his arms and fantasize that he was riding an elephant. The next
morning, giving a kind of private blessing to all his relatives despite their
demands, he decides to walk rather than drive to work, leaving his house
unlocked. Walking along the road, he is stretching out his arms as in his
dream of childhood when a workmate called George stops to pick him
up. George has a cigar and has just borrowed money to improve his car.
Together they test it for speed:
“Go,” I said. “What are you waiting for, George.” And that’s
when we really flew. Wind howled outside the windows. He
had it floored, and we were going flat out. We streaked down
that road in his big unpaid-for car. (90)
With the new questions posed by climate change in mind, what kinds
of readings emerge of such a text?
Firstly, perhaps, that if “Capitalism must be regarded as an economy
of unpaid costs,” (K. William Kapp, qtd. in Foster 37) then “Elephant”
could easily read as a kind of environmental allegory, as a narrative of a
chain of unpaid debt and unearned support extending itself into the fi-
nal image of the large unpaid for car. This relatively obvious first reading,
however, can be deepened by considerations of scale.
Any broadly mimetic interpretation of a text, mapping it onto different
if hopefully illuminating terms, always assumes a physical and temporal
scale of some sort. It is a precondition of any such mapping, though al-
most never explicit in the interpretation. The scale in which one reads a
text drastically alters the kinds of significance attached to elements of it,
but, as we will see, it cannot itself give criteria for judgment.
Three scales can be used. Firstly, we could read the text on a (critically
naïve) personal scale that takes into account only the narrator’s immedi-
ate circle of family and acquaintances over a time scale of several years.
158 Timothy Clark
At this scale there is a certain humanist coziness about the text, as if the
Carver story were already a commercial screenplay. Family loyalty wins
out against misfortune; love and forgiveness prevail in a tale of minor but
genuine domestic heroism. The reading could refer to Carver’s defense
of the short story as throwing “some light on what it is that makes and
keeps us, often against great odds, recognizably human” (Nesset 104).
In this respect “Elephant” would even come close to being a kind of
Carver schmaltz.
A second scale is that almost always assumed in literary criticism. Spa-
tially, it is that of a national culture and its inhabitants, with a time frame
of perhaps a few decades, a “historical period“ of some kind. Almost all
criticism of Carver is situated at this scale, placing his work in the cultural
context of the late twentieth century United States (or sometimes, on a
broader scale, that of the modern short story after Edgar Allan Poe). Kirk
Nesset, writing in 1995, is representative: “Carver’s figures dramatize and
indirectly comment upon the problems besetting American culture, par-
ticularly lower middle-class culture, today” (7). Other topics prominent
in discussions of Carver are broadly located at this scale, such as unem-
ployment and consumer culture as they affect personal relationships,
the ideals and realities of American domesticity, that society’s material-
ism, and its concepts of gender, especially masculinity. This scale enables
an interpretation of the final scene of “Elephant” as an affirmative but
temporary moment of escape from the denigrations and frustrations of
American consumer capitalism, focused on the private car as an image of
individual freedom and mobility.
The third, hypothetical scale is, of course, the difficult one. It could be,
spatially, that of the whole earth and its inhabitants, and placing “Ele-
phant” in the middle of a, let us say, six hundred year time frame i.e. from
three hundred years before 1988 to 2288, three hundred after, and bear-
ing in mind authoritative plausible scenarios for the habitability of the
planet at that time.
What does this do? An initial impulse is that trying to read “Elephant”
at this scale simply does not “make sense.” It seems deliberately to repeat
the kind of derangement of scale familiar in environmental slogans (“eat
less meat and save the planet”). At the same time, the feeling of paraly-
sis or arbitrariness in the experiment cannot override the conviction that
Scale 159
to read at scales that used, familiarly, to “make sense” may now also be a
form of intellectual and ethical containment.
What, then, is being held off? Viewed on very long time scales, hu-
man history and culture can take on unfamiliar shapes, as work in envi-
ronmental history repeatedly demonstrates, altering conceptions of what
makes something “important” and what does not.4 Nonhuman entities
take on a decisive agency. Thus some would argue that, globally, the two
major events of the past three centuries have been the industrial exploi-
tation of fossil fuels and a worldwide supplanting of local biota in favor
of an imported portmanteau of profitable species: cattle, wheat, sheep,
maize, sugar, coffee, eucalyptus, palm oil, etc. Thus it is that most of the
world’s wheat, a crop originally from the middle east, now comes from
other areas—Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia—just as
people of originally European descent now dominate a large propor-
tion of the earth’s surface. This huge shift in human populations, includ-
ing slaves as well as domesticated animals and plants, has largely deter-
mined the modern world, with its close connections between destructive
monocultures in food production, exploitative systems of international
trade and exchange and the institution of the modern state. At its bleak-
est, an ecological overview of the current state of the planet shows a huge
bubble of population and consumption in one species intensifying expo-
nentially and expanding at a rate that cannot be supported by the planet’s
resources for long. It is the transitory world of this bizarre, destructive
and temporary energy imbalance that Western populations currently in-
habit and take for a stable and familiar reality.
One element of containment in lower scale readings of “Elephant,”
blind to this bigger reality, is the “methodological nationalism” of read-
ings located at the middle scale. “Methodological nationalism” is a term
taken from A.D. Smith and used by Ulrich Beck: “While reality is be-
coming [or always was?] thoroughly cosmopolitan, our habits of thought
and consciousness, like the well-worn paths of academic teaching and
research, disguise the growing unreality of the world of nation-states”
(21). That is, we often still think, interpret and judge as if the territori-
al bounds of the nation state acted as a self-evident principle of overall
coherence and intelligibility within which a history and culture can be
understood—ignoring anything that does not fit such a narrative. After
160 Timothy Clark
a job because his car broke down, or the way the narrator’s brother prom-
ises,” I’ve got this job lined up. It’s definite. I’ll have to drive fifty miles
round trip every day, but that’s no problem—hell, no. I’d drive a hundred
and fifty if I had too” (83). Cars also proliferate themselves through the
parasitism of ideologies of individual “freedom”—“Elephant” ends with
the narrator in the passenger seat, on a high of speed urging on George,
complete with cigar, to drive as fast as he possibly can.
To highlight nonhuman agency adds a missing dimension to such fa-
miliar critical topoi, in reading Carver, as the erosion of communal val-
ues, or to the social/cultural force of Carver’s so-called minimalism in
short story technique, its projection of a late-capitalist society of disjunc-
tive surfaces and personal isolation in which the lack of a completely reli-
able sense of relation between cause and effect, intention and result, ef-
fort and reward, is accompanied by a pervading sense of insecurity. The
futural reading further decenters human agency, underlining the fragility
and contingency of effective boundaries between public and private, ob-
jects and persons, the “innocent” and “guilty,” human history and natural
history, the traumatic and the banal, and (with technology) the conve-
nient and the disenfranchising. In sum, at the third scale, a kind of non-
anthropic irony deranges the short story as any easily assimilable object
of any given kind of moral/political reading.
Simon Levin writes “That there is no single correct scale or level at
which to describe a system does not mean that all scales serve equally
well or that there are not scaling laws” (1953). However, there are cru-
cial differences between reading a literary text at multiple scales and the
function of scales in scientific modeling and explanation. In such model-
ing, suppression of detail is seen as strength of work at large scales, where
broad patterns can emerge overriding individual variations. A literary
reading clearly works in no such way. Assumptions of scale are always at
work in any reading, but these may enable different judgments of value,
not decide them. The three scales produce readings of “Elephant” that
conflict with each other, yet can the third scale act as some final frame of
reference or court of last appeal deciding for us how to read the text? An
ecological overview is in danger of feeding a reductive but increasingly
familiar green moralism, keen to turn ecological facts into moral impera-
tives on how to live, blind to the sense of helplessness dominant in “El-
Scale 163
ephant” at the first scale. While it highlights the hidden costs of lower
scale thinking, the third scale’s tendency to register a person primarily as
a physical thing is evidently problematic, almost too brutally removed
from the daily interpersonal ethics, hopes and struggles that it ironizes.
For instance, although this essay chose the less controversial example of
cars, the most environmentally significant aspect of the situation project-
ed by the text would be the reproduction of people themselves. The fact
that the narrator has fathered two children would be more crucial—in
the brutal terms of physical emissions—than either his lifestyle or prop-
erty. This highlights an issue, overpopulation, which reduces even Donna
Haraway to contradiction—or, more strictly, to thinking on conflicting
scales at the same time—when she says in an interview “as a biologist,”
“in the face of a planet that’s got well over 6 billion people now”:
the carrying capacity of the planet probably isn’t that. And I
don’t care how many times you talk about the regressive na-
ture of anti-natalist ideologies and population control ideolo-
gies. All true, but without serious population reduction we
aren’t going to make it as a species, and neither are thousands
or millions of other species….So you can hate the Chinese
for the one-child policy and also think they are right (laughs).
(qtd. in Schneider 153)
In sum, reading at several scales at once cannot be just the abolition of
one scale in the greater claim of another but a way of enriching, singular-
izing and yet also creatively deranging the text through embedding it in
multiple and even contradictory frames at the same time (so that even
the most enlightened seeming progressive social argument may have
one in agreement on one scale and reaching for a conceptual brick on
another). The overall interpretation of “Elephant” offered here can only
be a multiple, self-conflictual one. The acts of the narrator remain ones of
great personal generosity even if, at the same time, scale effects ironically
implicate them in incalculable evil. The text emerges, simultaneously, de-
pending on the scale at issue, as (1) a wry anecdote of personal heroism,
(2) a protest against social exclusion, and (3) a confrontation with the
entrapment of human actions and decisions within a disastrous imper-
164 Timothy Clark
Notes
1. This does not exclude that deceptive fix, the electric car. Most of the polluting
emissions associated with any car come from the process of its manufacture.
The electricity that powers a supposedly eco-friendly car would need to have
been generated somewhere.
2. Brown contrasts the alternative notion of democracy as the difficult
challenge of genuinely sharing power to the liberal conception of delegated
power as supposedly forming the outward-facing barrier behind which
individual “freedom” is lived out. Vincent B. Leitch, querying the absence
of any communitarian element in Derrida’s political thinking, finds “a
long rightward-leaning libertarian shadow [cast] over Derrida‘s left-wing
democratic politics” (242).
3. I go into more detail on this in the chapter “Freedoms and the Institutional
Americanism of Literary Study,” in my The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-
Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer 11–31.
4. See, for instance, Ponting, Crosby, Chew, and Diamond.
5. See Ophuls 169–74.
6. Michael Northcott writes: “The ascription ‘private’ is increasingly problematic
when applied to automobiles. Their use requires the public maintenance of an
extensive concrete, steel and tarmac infrastructure, representing one half of
the built space of European and American cities” (215–6).
Scale 165
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